In 2011, I visited the land of Israel on a trip for American Jews, organized by an orthodox yeshiva- kind of like Birthright, only more religious. I remember how holy it felt to dunk in the mikvah (ritual bath) used by the Arizal, Isaac Luria, legendary 16th-century Kabbalist, in the holy city of Tzvat. I remember how blessed I was, to pray in Hebron at the graves of the matriarchs and patriarchs of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. I remember when I burst into tears, chanting the Mourner’s Kaddish for my grandfather, on his yahrzeit (the anniversary of his passing), at the Western Wall.

As I gradually became aware of the great injustices, past and present, committed in that holy land, my prayers came to include prayers for justice. ‘May the Palestinians ethnically cleansed from Tzvat,’ I prayed, ‘now exiled in refugee camps and around the world, be able one day to return home.’ ‘May the deep, deep structures of inequality and dominance be lifted from Hebron, this holy place.’ ‘May the brutal military occupation end, here at the Kotel and across Israel/Palestine.’

I trusted there was something deeply human, and deeply Jewish, about those prayers. When I returned to America, I decided, in the words of Heschel, to “pray with my feet”. I put those prayers into action, as a member and, later, a staff person at Jewish Voice for Peace. And now, for doing so, I am banned from visiting the land of Israel by its current government.

My first reaction to hearing news of the ban was shock, then sadness. Will I ever be able again to kiss the stones of the Kotel, to pray at the graves of rabbis and holy men? And I know this sadness pales in comparison to my Palestinian friends in Chicago, who dream of being able to visit or return to their homeland, whose families still hold the keys to the homes from which they were expelled.

While it did not, as of yet, turn me into an Orthodox Jew, my first trip to the holy land made a lasting impression on my spiritual life, as such pilgrimages have for Jews over centuries. I know that one day, I will be able to make such a pilgrimage again. Only next time, there will also be Palestinians on that plane. As I step off the plane and kiss the ground of the holy land, they too, will kiss the ground- because they are finally, truly, home. Next time, when I pray at the Kotel or Hebron, it will be a just place, where no homes are raided, no children are caged, no races or creeds are profiled, no people must live at the mercy of a checkpoint or under the barrel of a gun.

It is this vision of freedom and dignity for all, that is so threatening and terrifying to present-day Israel. And like all great visions, it cannot be banned, legislated, or intimidated out of existence. Israel will not succeed, with this ban, in intimidating American Jews away from joining JVP and supporting the BDS movement for justice and equality. Nor will it succeed in stifling the Palestinian call for justice, or in bullying people of conscience the world over from supporting that call.

Next time I visit Israel/Palestine, its laws will be as just as its land is holy. And until then, I think of the classic meditation of Rebbe Nachman, that I learned on my yeshiva trip. “The whole world is a very narrow bridge,” he said, “and the main thing, is not to be afraid at all.”

Here’s a nightmare fantasy of mine. Before long, mainstream Democrat-voting American Jews won’t be afraid to talk about the occupation. Quite the contrary- they’ll insist at social gatherings that they’ve been against it all along; they’ll congratulate themselves for cursing Bibi and Trump; ‘our Israel’, they’ll tell each other, ‘would never do the terrible things Bibi’s Israel is doing today’. How great they will feel about themselves, when their institutions can finally display with pride- We stand against the occupation!

Only it will be 50 years too late- nay, 25 years too late. Their collective voices could have been very useful during the Oslo Accords, but today, Bibi’s Israel doesn’t need liberal American Jews- it finds its solid base of support in the right-wing Orthodox, and the evangelical Christian Right. The occupation is permanent. Reform movement leader Rick Jacobs will wear an ‘I Stand Against the Occupation’ pin when he gets arrested at the Kotel with Women of the Wall- but will it matter?

American Jews will be able to congratulate themselves en masse for opposing occupation precisely when that gesture is politically irrelevant. It will soothe their consciences, and absolve them of historical responsibility for a situation they couldn’t face, and can no longer influence. And lord knows, they still won’t talk about the Nakba and Palestinian right of return.

Cringy NYT op-eds like this pave the way towards that reality. In 2018, let’s challenge ourselves and our communities to broaden the discourse, play to win, face reality and not settle for less.

For the author, a Jew in the diaspora feels discomforted, unsettled, and out-of-place within the larger non-Jewish society. Confronted by Christmas and the many other culturally dominant rituals and behavior patterns of non-Jews, Jewishness in diaspora is visualized by the author as a neurotic and burdensome need to assert our difference, an unhappy struggle to maintain distinct from the non-Jew. In Israel, by contrast, ‘the sense of belonging is taken for granted’, one no longer has to work to maintain difference, and surrounded by other Jews in a Jewish-majority society, one can finally relax. Not needing to do anything particularly Jewish, but resting secure in the comfort that, for once, we are the majority and the Christian is a guest within our nation- this, for the author, is what ‘feeling Jewish enough’, feeling ‘secure enough as a Jew’ feels like.

Every Christmas, American Jews hear the ‘good news’ of Zionism from emissaries of the state of Israel. As this author puts it, ‘language, food preferences, traditions—everything stagnates in diaspora’- and only Israel can save Jewish identity in the modern world.

And every year it bears repeating- no, Zionists, Jewishness does not stagnate in diaspora, it is not ‘less than’, it is not insecure in itself. Jewish culture, spirituality, philosophy, and life flourished for *thousands of years* in the diaspora- long before your fledgling Maccabee-cosplay experiment was a twinkle in Herzl’s eye. Diaspora is the lifeblood of Jewish peoplehood.

Yes, it takes work to maintain Jewish particularity and difference within a larger non-Jewish society, but this does not make one ‘not Jewish enough’, ‘not secure enough’ or ‘less than’ anything. In fact, the very substance of Jewish identity, as articulated in the Torah and concretized in ritual developed over millenia, is that we are commanded to mark, perform and reaffirm our difference, to celebrate our particularity by enacting rituals that distinguish us from non-Jews. This isn’t an unhappy burden, as the author asserts; we are commanded to rejoice in it. It is the beating heart of Jewish peoplehood.

Zionism needs to hold a monopoly on Jewish authenticity, in order for its project to remain compelling for Jews worldwide. So it shames Jews all over the world into thinking that Jewish life in the diaspora is an insurmountable contradiction, a curse, and that the only way to remain fully, authentically Jewish in the modern world, is to live in a Jewish-majority society.

Articles like this come out every year around Christmastime, reinforcing the American Jewish inferiority complex, beckoning us to swallow a fantasy vision of Israel as symbol of Jewish fulfillment. This diaspora-shaming mentality is deeply ingrained in Zionism, and not surprisingly, American Jews who internalize this diaspora self-hatred tend to overcompensate by performing the most unflinching, uncompromising support for Israel’s policies at all costs.

Normally, the gospel announced by these Zionist emissaries is that in the diaspora, Jews will assimilate into non-Jewish society, will lose all desire to remain Jewish, and only in Israel can Jews maintain their difference. In this particular article, however, the argument is reversed. Only in the diaspora, the author asserts, do we have do to the tedious work of maintaining our difference, while in Israel we can drop all pretenses, assimilate, and stop working so hard to remain Jewish. The ‘authentic Jewishness’ coveted by the author in Israel is ‘mundane’, as she puts it, in the truest sense- it is a simple, effortless, normalized national identity. One feels ‘fully Jewish’ in Israel like a Frenchman feels ‘fully French’ in France. For the author, this is what our ancestors envisioned when, for generations, they prayed, with tears in their eyes, towards Jerusalem; it’s really as simple as that.

But this is actually a mockery of what makes Jewishness special. For thousands of years, our cultures have flourished precisely through the hard work of maintaining distinctiveness, while also dynamically cross-fertilizing with the cultures around us. Living for millennia across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and around the world, the vibrancy of Jewishness has come from the creative tension generated by dwelling amongst others, influencing and being influenced by the larger non-Jewish world.

Granted, the problems of assimilation in the modern world are real. Ever since the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), modern Jews have been grappling with how to maintain vibrant Jewish peoplehood in pluralistic, individualist modern societies. The internal structure of Jewish communities changed drastically under the liberalizing pressures of the modern, secular world, and like many other cultures, much has been radically transformed, and much has been lost.

But is Zionism- the move to close ourselves off in an all-Jewish society, to live by the sword, and to lord over another people- really the answer to the challenges posed to Jewishness by modernity? Does Israeli Jewish society- dominated by an Ashkenazi elite, addicted to occupation and the racism it engenders, ruptured by religious antagonisms, lurching towards fascism- really represent the apotheosis of Jewish peoplehood, the consummation and deepest flourishing of our culture and life?

I’m sorry writers like this don’t feel ‘Jewish enough’ outside Israel, but that’s their problem, and it’s a sentiment utterly foreign to Jewish history and memory. Living amongst others, navigating our relationship to those others, transforming and being transformed by them, while maintaining a strong sense of our own identity and community- this is what has defined and animated the Jewish experience ‘from time immemorial’. The modern world continues to pose many questions and challenges to Jewish peoplehood, but conjuring up a nation-state of our own to rescue and normalize us is hardly a worthy answer to these questions. It’s a wish-fulfillment that grows more destructive every day, not only to Palestinians, but to the Jewish soul as well.

Today, what Hellenization looks like for the Jewish people is Zionism, and complicity in Empire and white supremacy.

The notion that the Land of Israel is real estate, that the Torah is our deed of ownership, that the Jewish people were, for over 2,000 years, little more than a nation-state in waiting, and that now, with the state of Israel and its capital Jerusalem, we have blossomed into our true stature as ‘a nation like all other nations’;

The notion that militarism represents our pride and glory as a people, and that Jewish identity requires little more than cheering on the state of Israel, as one would a football team;

The notion that our self-determination and safety as a people can be won through allying with the Trumps of the world, the might and power of American empire, the white evangelical movement, and the forces of Christian hegemony more broadly-

These, and so much more, are the creeping forces of modern-day Hellenization that have worked to fundamentally warp our identities, our institutions, our communities. This worship of power, of Edom, of survival at all costs; this readiness to forego solidarity, to forget our histories, to mimic the oppressors of the world and inflict oppression upon the powerless.

Unlike the Maccabees, let us not zealously demand a return to any ‘fundamental’, true or pure Judaism- these notions of authenticity are ultimately as oppressive as those which we struggle against.

But like the Maccabees, let us not be afraid to name, call out, uproot and smash the forces of assimilation, self-deception, falsehood and corruption that threaten to destroy the body and soul of the Jewish people, from within.

May we ensure that this self-replenishing flame of justice and internal critique burns brighter in our day, and in days to come, and may the forces of wickedness be banished from the earth!

“Remember the days of the world; understand the years of each generation” (Devarim, 32:7)

“…that [we] may turn the heart of the fathers back through the children, and the heart of the children back through their fathers” (Malachi, 3:24)

Last month, the eyes of the liberal American Jewish world were fixed on the Kotel. In a rare display of unity and resolve, leaders of the Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist movements banded together to demand a mixed-gender space at the Western Wall, in a clear pushback against the institutional power of ultra-Orthodoxy in Israel. So deep were we stung by this bitter betrayal, that for the first time in living memory, prominent liberal American Jews even threatened to boycott Netanyahu’s government over its refusal to recognize the liberal diaspora.

And yet, even as we are united in condemnation of ultra-Orthodox fundamentalism, the liberal American Jewish world remains more divided than ever. Day after day, the establishment sounds the alarms- rates of intermarriage are skyrocketing, and more and more American Jews are publicly opposing Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Many cease to identify with Zionism at all, as the rift between Israel and diaspora Jewry widens daily[1]. For the establishment, the idea that masses of Jews are embracing intermarriage and abandoning Israel rings the death-knell of Jewish peoplehood in America. Such gestures, according to common-sense logic, threaten to dissolve the very ties that make a Jew a Jew.

Liberal American Jewry is utterly transfixed by these crises. In the same week that the Kotel crisis made headlines, a leading Conservative rabbi shocked the Jewish world by announcing his intention to officiate at intermarriages[2], while a new report warned of a massive drop-off in support for Israel among American Jewish college students[3]. Prominent liberal columnist J.J. Goldberg evokes this creeping malaise in his recent piece, “The Rise and Fall of American Jewish Hope”, where he laments the “strange metamorphosis of the Jewish spirit over the past century, from hopeful optimism in the face of great suffering to bitterness and suspicion amid plenty…[if], for a half-century after 1917, the dominant mood among Jews in America and Israel alike was one of optimism…in the half-century since 1967, the mood has been increasingly gloomy and cynical.”[4]

My contention is that these crises signify not the end of liberal Jewish identity in America, but its new beginning. Put simply, we are in transition towards a future where our communal identity will not be defined by support for Israel, nor will it rest primarily upon markers of blood. This is progress- in fact, far from combatting assimilation, our decades-long fixation on Israel and endogamy has sapped American Jewish identity of the vitality and dynamism it needs to survive.

For too long, mainstream Jewish America has turned the dictum of Rabbi Hillel on its head- “make Jewish babies and support Israel”, we tell our children; “the rest is commentary, and little need to study it.” We are beginning to shake loose these inherited normative frameworks, and evolve in exciting new directions. The establishment is in panic precisely because, in its gut, it knows these tremors announce the birth-pangs of a new American Jewish identity, breaking through the stultified crust of the old.

– – –

Growing Up Assimilated

As Campus Coordinator with Jewish Voice for Peace, I see these transformations play out every day. I work with hundreds of Jewish college students who support BDS and, in many cases, identify as anti- or non-Zionist. Beyond these students, there are thousands more, in organizations like IfNotNow and Open Hillel, who publicly and proudly oppose Israel’s occupation as Jews. Mirroring trends across the Jewish world, many of us come from mixed families, and many ourselves have non-Jewish partners. We are no less Jewish than our predecessors.

I see these transformations play out in my family history as well. I am a product of American Jewish assimilation. I come from a middle-class, Ashkenaz, suburban family. I was raised by loving parents who married within the tribe, but didn’t really bring much Jewish substance into our home. We ate bagels and lox and watched Seinfeld; we had chanukiahsand Kiddush cups on a shelf in a living room cabinet. But these superficial expressions of identity represented the full extent of our domestic Jewishness.

I am grateful for the Jewish upbringing my parents provided me. I belonged to a Conservative synagogue, went to Hebrew school, had a Bar Mitzvah and even went to Jewish sports camp for two weeks every summer. On the level of institutions, my parents checked all the right boxes. But in my house, we celebrated only Passover and Hannukah, never Shabbat, and usually went to shul only for the High Holidays, where we sat bored and sleepy through the service. My parents were not religious, and did not have a strong connection to the many secular strands of Jewish politics and culture forged in the modern era. Basically, we knew that we were Jews, and did the basics with pride- more than many families!- but on the level of our daily lives, we didn’t much notice or care.

In college, I began to encounter Jewishness anew. At first, as a philosophy major, I found myself drawn to ideas and themes deemed, by academics, to be quintessentially ‘Jewish’ in the works of philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin and Karl Marx. Over the next few years of self-education, I steadily assembled the pieces of a radical Jewish identity. When two of my secular friends became ultra-Orthodox and nudged me to join them at a yeshiva in Israel, I went with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. My two-month introduction to Torah and Talmud at yeshiva, though brief and not without its faults, exposed me to a depth of Jewish life immeasurably richer than anything I remembered from the dry and emotionless synagogue of my childhood.

During these years, as my love of Yiddishkeit grew, my views on Israel/Palestine began to change as well. I was born during the First Intifada, and became Bar Mitzvah during the Second. To my memory, my family celebrated Israel the same way we recognized our Jewishness- automatically, by default, without much fanfare or attention. My parents and grandparents bought Israel Bonds for me, and spoke warmly of the state from time to time, but my parents never visited, never encouraged me to visit, and seemed to know very little, in fact, about the actual history or politics of the country. While I drank, without questioning, the standard serving of hasbara Kool-Aid in shul and Hebrew School, strong Zionism was not a constituent part of my upbringing.

Perhaps for this reason, it was relatively easy for me, in college, to re-educate myself around the conflict, hear alternate perspectives, and come to support the burgeoning grassroots movement for Palestinian rights. After my time at the yeshiva, I crossed over to the West Bank, saw the occupation with my own eyes, and decided to spend several months there as a journalist and activist. I felt angry, and betrayed, to discover that behind the idyllic image of Israel presented to me in Hebrew school, there lurked the brutality of the apartheid wall, the cruelty of home demolitions, the terror of tear gas, and the thousand small humiliations faced daily by millions of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

Today, like many other American Jews, I support the BDS movement, identify as anti-Zionist, and dream of a decolonized Israel/Palestine where all live equal and free. Also like many others, this identity awakens in me a still greater need to understand Judaism, Zionism, and the complex, entangled histories that have brought our people to this moment. I continue to develop my Jewishness, in the many secular and spiritual forms it takes, guided by a deep love for the journey itself- a love that, had I not searched for it on my own, I may never have found.

My family’s story, and my own, is by no means universal- across liberal American Jewish life, there is great diversity in the way we relate to Jewish ritual and culture, to Israel, to each other and ourselves. Nonetheless, my family’s story, rooted in the particularities of our white Ashkenazi experience, traces an arc common across much of mainstream American Jewish life. In the latter half of the 20th century, American Jewish assimilation, and support for Israel, went hand in hand.

– – –

Zionism, Assimilation, and American Jews

My parents became b’nai Mitzvah in 1967, the year of the Six Day War. At this time, their families, like those of many American Jews, had comfortably assimilated into white middle-class American culture. The process of identification with the mainstream was, for these generations of American Jews, a complex phenomenon- at once adopted willingly, and enforced upon us by the many social pressures of post-war America; at once a means for our communal empowerment, and a response, so soon after the Holocaust, to the ever-present fear of persecution[5]. And as with many other groups, our assimilation came at a price- over the course of the 20th century, the more we became American, the more we lost many of the spiritual and secular[6], modern and pre-modern expressions of Jewish ritual, culture and community that had sustained our people’s existence for centuries.

As my parents strode across the bimah to enter Jewish adulthood, Israel strode to the forefront of the American Jewish psyche. After its victory in 1967, Israel was embraced with pride by my parent’s generation as a tangible symbol of Jewish safety, success and self-determination. Living under the long shadow of the Holocaust, Israel came to symbolize, for American Jews, the dynamic epicenter, the forward-looking vanguard of Jewish existence. As older religious and secular Jewish identities became dulled by assimilation, suppressed by McCarthyism, and otherwise diluted in the American melting pot, Zionism became an acceptable mold in which to cast our civic identities as Jews.

To be clear, these processes of assimilation and secularization were underway well before Israel’s victory in 1967[7]. Nonetheless, it can be said that for the generations of American Jews raised after 1967, Israel became “the new Torah, the new Judaism,” said JJ Goldberg at the recent ‘Israel at the Crossroads’ conference. “It used to be if you kept kosher and you kept shabbos, you were Jewish. Now it doesn’t matter what you do on Saturday as long as you support Israel….”[8] Zionism bolstered American Jewish assimilation by offering, to its believers, the allure of Jewish nationalism as an easy substitute for abandoned forms of Jewish identity and practice. By the time my generation came around, American Jewish identity had long since become doubly displaced- vanished from the home, it was outsourced to institutions like the synagogue and Hebrew school; and these institutions of Jewish life, in turn, imported much of their substance and content ready-made from Israel.

This by no means meant that American Jews grappled rigorously with Israel in its actuality, as a real country with whose details they were deeply acquainted. The Israel towards which the congregants at my shul prayed every Saturday dwelt, within many of them, more as an emotion, a safe haven, a symbol of Jewish perseverance and self-determination forged by Paul Newman in Exodus, Birthright, the JNF and B’nai Brith. This is why, during the Kotel crisis, liberal American Jewry seemed shocked, blindsided to discover that Netanyahu’s Israel, dominated by the Orthodox, actually had no desire to appease our liberalism. It was as if, in return for buying Israel Bonds and sending our kids on Birthright, we expected this country to remain truly our own, to faithfully reflect the contours of our progressive Jewishness back at us.

This willful ignorance of the real Israel also means that, day after day, the bulk of American Jewry remains willfully unaware of the suffering of the Palestinian people. While our communal eye was fixed on the Kotel, few of us knew of the brutal blackout imposed on the Palestinians of Gaza as a result of Israel’s decades-long blockade. We’ll write the state a check, defend its policies in the public sphere, and send our kids there on Birthright, but Israel remains for us, as Noam Scheizaf wrote in +972 Magazine, suspended “in a plane thatis separate from politics, and therefore shielded from the nativist and xenophobic ideological trends that have come to dominate Israel in recent years.” Taken together, our outcry over the Kotel crisis, and our silence around the crisis in Gaza, show that we remain blind to the moral rot steadily decaying a country founded and maintained upon the displacement and subjugation of its indigenous population, and given over increasingly to religious fanaticism.

Our fixation on an imaginary Israel also blinds us to ourselves. In a way, the American Jewish identity crafted by our mainstream institutions, and internalized by many of us, has existed in a state of perpetual displacement, a dislocated, split Jewishness fixated more upon Israel as scene of Jewish self-actualization, and less upon our own American Jewishness on its own terms, as its own entity. We are encouraged to assume that Jewish life in Israel is the center, the vanguard of world Jewry, while our own communities are secondary and peripheral to the modern Jewish narrative[9]. For too many of us, our Jewish hearts throb when we regale ourselves with tales of David Ben-Gurion, illumined with the glow of the ancient King David- but we neglect to commit ourselves to the hard work of building vibrant Jewish communities here in America, where we actually live[10].

To be sure, Zionism is not the sole force behind the emptying-out of post-war American Jewish identity; nor can we overlook the many vibrant movements, from Reconstructionism and Renewal to the Havurah movement, New Jewish Agenda, and more, that grew firmly from American Jewish soil. But such movements have tended to flourish in the margins, while the mainstream, trapped in multiple layers of displacement and self-deception, has steadily stagnated. Our communal discourse around intermarriage reveals another side to the crisis.

– – –

A Judaism of Blood and State

“It wasn’t so important to me to practice Judaism in the home,” my father once told me, “or to learn much about it- but it was very important for me to marry a Jewish woman. And not a convert, a Jewish woman by birth. After the Holocaust, I wanted to do my part to keep Judaism alive.” Thankfully, my parents always made sure to empower my brother and I to marry whomever we loved, regardless of religion. But over the years, the problematic strangeness of my father’s statement became more apparent to me. The irony is that, while endogamy has clearly been an important part of Jewish survival through centuries of diaspora, with real roots in text and tradition, this racialized conception of Jewishness- as primarily an ethnic tribe, bound together irreducibly by blood quanta- has more in common with the ‘eternal Jew’ of modern anti-Semitism, than with the ‘nation of Torah’, grounded in communal worship and practice, that our ancestors fought to preserve[11].

Clearly, my parents, and many others like them, wanted to marry Jewish in order to preserve Judaism. My father was named for a relative who perished in the Holocaust, and was taught, from an early age, to ‘keep the blood line going’, as he describes it. But the deeper irony is that, in ‘marrying Jewish’ while neglecting to really dig deep into the substance of Jewish life, mainstream American Jewry has raised kids who don’t really care about Jewishness, and won’t pass it on. Had I not rediscovered Jewishness anew in college, my Bar Mitzvah could easily have marked, as it does for many, my exit from Jewish life. Under the guise of preserving Jewishness, families like mine, by disengaging from the depth of Jewish experience, help create the conditions for its disappearance.

Why did American Jewishness ground itself in ties of blood and state, and little else? The reasons are many. As scholars like Noam Pianko have pointed out[12], the ethnocultural notion of ‘Jewish peoplehood’ was crafted as a proto-Zionist identity in the 1930s, as a tool to allow Jews to fit comfortably into a post-war America which saw itself increasingly as a patchwork of ethnicities. Living under the shadow of the Holocaust, the impulse of Jewish survival became the all-important ’614th commandment’, as Reform rabbi Emil Fackenheim put it in 1965- and for many, especially the secular, making Jewish babies and defending the Jewish state became the primary ways to fulfill this commandment.

Today, Birthright Israel embodies perfectly the biopolitics of blood and state Judaism. Created to combat assimilation in America, Birthright Israel flies young Jews to Israel and encourages them to fornicate with each other[13] there. ‘Make Jewish babies and support Israel’- this central message of Birthright ensures that values of blood and state will underlie what, for many, will be the formative Jewish experience of their adult lives[14].

According to the logic of the establishment, ‘make Jewish babies and support Israel’ is the very formula that can assure the survival of American Jewry in a fast-changing world. Of course, this logic dictates, endogamy is the obvious way to preserve communal boundaries in the vast American melting pot; and, of course, only a Jewish ethno-state can ensure Jewish safety, continuity and self-determination in a world marred by the permanent threat of persecution. Taking this logic to its conclusion, the same right-wing, fundamentalist Israeli Orthodoxy that denied us a spot at the Kotel insists, with smug satisfaction, that we are doomed to vanish in the ‘second Holocaust’ of intermarriage and assimilation[15]. And so long as liberal Jewry is bound by the same logic, it can provide no real rebuttal to its interlocutors; it can only view its present condition as one of catastrophe, anxiously awaiting the next Pew study to confirm its self-pity and despair.

Today, however, we see that this strategy for combating assimilation has backfired, that the values of blood and state only serve to accelerate the emptying-out of Jewish identity and community in America. A Jewishness reduced to the simple imperatives to preserve a blood line that is increasingly intermingled, and to defend a nation-state whose policies are increasingly indefensible, cannot last- its children will quietly drop the torch. And why would they do otherwise? What is exciting, energizing, enlivening about a Jewishness framed solely as a defensive struggle against extinction, a Jewishness lived in the shadow of death?

What is lost, for a Jewishness that rests easy within the ready-made containers of nation-state and blood-tribe, is the ritual and song that made our ancestors tremble; the texts they pored over by candlelight; the values that girded their footsteps; the secular Jewish theatre, dance, and poetry that enflamed their hearts; the proud traditions of radicalism that gave direction to their days. What is lost, most of all, is a sense of Jewishness as struggle and commitment, as the hard work of being klal Yisrael, those who wrestle with God. This is the deep crisis faced by liberal American Jewry- and traveling halfway around the world, to beg the ultra-Orthodox for a spot at the Kotel, won’t save us.

To maintain a robust Jewishness in a modern world of distraction, it is not enough to hold Jewish identity merely as a feature of blood or genetics, or to root for a nation-state as if it were a football team. Even as, today, we are relatively free from persecution, we still must say, as did our ancestors, that shver tzu zein a yid, ‘it is hard to be a Jew’- our Jewishness must be molded, shaped, questioned, held before our eyes, and on our lips, again and again, the length of our days.

– – –

A Way Forward

How to renew a Jewishness dismembered by assimilation, dulled by overemphasis on blood, warped by worship of state? This hard work will take many forms. Some will work to revitalize neglected spiritual traditions; some will work to remember forgotten histories; some will work to build new institutions of learning and community; some will fight to end our communal complicity in Israel’s occupation and apartheid, and our own complicity in systems of oppression here in America. My intention is not to legislate any of the myriad ‘paths of return’ as more authentic than any other, nor even to insist that every Jew must do this hard work to win their badge of authenticity. But the future of liberal American Jewishness will be secured when more of us put in this hard work, and stitch together new collectives bound by revitalized myths, rituals, beliefs, histories, radicalisms that will again sit at the center of our shared existence, illumining our comings and goings with meaning, beauty, purpose and transcendence.

And in truth, deep changes are already afoot in American Jewry. As more young Jews join movements like JVP, IfNotNow and Open Hillel to fight Israeli apartheid, challenge the hegemony of Zionism and confront the moral vacuity of our communal leadership, we are fortifying our commitment to Jewishness, even as we call for its radical transformation. In questioning Israel, our Jewishness itself becomes a question for us. In dislodging Zionism, that which it had submerged comes again to the surface. We discover anew our forgotten histories, our discarded modes of practice and ritual, our long-neglected muscles of activism and organizing. And what terrifies our elders, anxious to maintain their grip on the only Jewish identity they know, is precisely that, in saying ‘no!’ to Zionism, we are saying ‘yes!’ to Jewishness.

In the same sense, whenever a Jewish community commits to welcoming into the communal tent intermarried couples, patrilineal Jews and all others excluded by our narrow fixation on endogamy, that community is asserting that the Jewishness they share is no longer founded chiefly upon blood. What, then, will sit at the center of their collective Jewish experience? As more of us ask this question, we are shaping the contours of an American Jewry bound, as a community, by ties deeper, holier and more lasting than that of an ethnic tribe. It is no coincidence that in these diverse and pluralistic Jewish communities, one is more likely to find Jews critical of Israel’s occupation, Jews who no longer identify as Zionist. For taken together, these twin trends are at the cutting edge of what 21st-century liberal American Jewishness will look like.

To be sure, the work of progressive Jewish communal renewal in America runs deep, and the battles raging in our communities over endogamy and Zionism can only mark the beginning of this work. Without a larger revitalization of liberal American Jewish practice, culture and community, these battles may be mere epiphenomena for a community en route to extinction. But the angst of the establishment shows that we have hit a nerve, that by rattling the shaky foundations of yesterday’s Jewishness, our movements can open the floodgates for the most profound transformation American Judaism has experienced in decades.

– – –

Watching the grainy ’90s home movies of my childhood in suburban Maryland, one moment in particular warms my Jewish heart. My parents and grandparents stand over my brother and I as we light Hanukkah candles, in the dark kitchen of our middle-class home. I was 10, my brother 8. Our faces are lit by the candles while the dim outlines of two generations are faintly visible behind us. The voices of my late grandmother and grandfather, my mother and father, my brother and me, merge as we sing together: ‘Baruch atah Adonai, eloheinu melech ha-olam…‘

Even as I trace the shortcomings of their generation, I cannot blame them for what has come of Jewishness in America. I can only thank my grandparents, may their memories be a blessing, for raising a family, helping found a synagogue, navigating the currents of post-war America as best they could; I can only thank my parents for doing all they could, in ways large and small, to raise us with love and blessings, as Jews, into this time. I can only offer to their generation, not anger for what was lost, but gratitude for what remains; not scorn, but tochecha (compassionate rebuke) for the shortcomings that, between then and now, have led our communities astray.

May we merit the strength to mourn that which was lost, and to remember that which was forgotten; to smash that which has obscured, and to lift that which was submerged; to confront that which has grown harmful, and to preserve that which remains strong; to inherit it all as one piece, the good and the bad, and to build, with love and with gratitude, the American Jewishness of tomorrow.

I’d like to thank my parents, Jonathan Gelernter, Lex Rofes, Benjamin Powell, and everyone else who provided feedback and support around this piece.

[5] As we assimilated, we assumed the many privileges of race and class enjoyed by the white middle class then flourishing under mid-20th century American racial capitalism. These privileges, past and present, must be entangled and confronted as we build a new Jewish identity in America. Though this writing focuses on the crises of endogamy and Zionism, the crisis of our communal complicity in white supremacy is closely related.

[9] In his book A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora, professor Daniel Boyarin writes that in the early centuries of the 1st millenium CE, “the Babylonian center” of world Jewry, “notwithstanding a certain degree of residual self-doubt, considered itself fully the equal, and even the superior, of the Palestinian center” (65)- that is to say, Jewish communities in the Babylonian diaspora viewed themselves on an equal footing, spiritually and culturally, with Jewish communities in Eretz Yisrael. Can we say the same regarding the modern relationship between American Jewry and the state of Israel?

[10] The recent words of Haaretz columnist Ofri Ilany come to mind- “it’s easy to be swept up by the propaganda of Benjamin Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett and to think that Israel is the center of Jewishness today, while the liberal Americans are just a pain in the neck,” he writes. “But that’s a biased picture. Even though there are nearly seven million Jews in Israel, it’s American Jewry that concentrates the meaningful Jewish cultural, economic and political clout in our world.” http://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-1.799606

[11] In his work Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology, Solomon Schechter, architect of Conservative Judaism, outlines the classical Rabbinic view that “[the Jewish people] is not a nation by virtue of race or of certain peculiar political combinations. As R. Saadya expressed it, ‘Because our nation is only a nation by reason of its Torah’.”

[14] It should also be noted that blood and state Judaism, by valorizing the Jewish womb as the chief anchor of Jewish continuity, helps reinforce patriarchy at the deepest levels of Jewish identity- though a full consideration of these matters is beyond the scope of this essay.

[15] As one columnist put it, “Netanyahu’s circle sees liberal Jewry as a transient phenomenon that will disappear on its own in another generation due to intermarriage and lack of interest in Jewish tradition or Israel.” http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.802602

Yesterday, a tweet making the rounds online depicted George Soros, progressive Hungarian Jewish philanthropist, as an octopus with tentacles embracing the earth’s surface. But this anti-Semitic tweet didn’t come from the alt-right- it came from Adam Milstein, real estate mogul and prominent pro-Israel philanthropist, whose Adam and Gila Milstein Family Foundation takes as its mission “to strengthen the State of Israel, the homeland of the Jewish People, and its special ties with the United States of America”.

The image was accompanied by the caption “Soros gives $18b to his Open Society fdn. $$ used for civil unrest, dividing Americans, and suppressing free speech”. Two days later, when his tweet began to receive negative attention, Milstein deleted the tweet and, bizarrely, retweeted the same message, with a different image. This time, his chosen meme attacked another progressive Jewish leader, legendary American Jewish community organizer Saul Alinsky, for allegedly engineering a conspiracy to ‘create a socialist state’ in America by controlling healthcare, gun laws, welfare and more.

As Campus Coordinator with Jewish Voice for Peace, I’m used to hearing, day after day, the false claims from pro-Israel figures like Milstein that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, led by groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), has created an unsafe and hateful campus climate for Jewish students. A recent study from Stanford confirms what I’ve heard from talking to Jewish students every day for over two years- that these allegations simply aren’t true.

Instead, students tell me that it is the rising antisemitic white nationalist movement in America-not student activism for Palestinian human rights- that makes them fear for their safety, as Jews, on campuses. How could a stalwart Israel advocate like Adam Milstein- a self-proclaimed frontline defender of Jewish students against antisemitism, a prominent board member of StandWithUs, Birthright Israel, the Israel on Campus Coalition, the AIPAC National Council and more, casually propagate well-worn alt-right anti-semitic motifs- all the more so at a time like this?

The prominent pro-Israel philanthropist’s attacks on Soros, whose Open Society Foundation funds pro-democracy and human rights causes around the world, comes as around the world, growing far-right ethno-nationalist movements scapegoat Soros, and progressive Jews more broadly, as the alleged masterminds of the progressive movements they abhor. In countries like Hungary, Soros-related antisemitism goes hand-in-hand with Islamophobia– and Milstein’s Twitter account, not surprisingly, is rife with diatribes against ‘Sharia law’, ‘radical Islam’ and other common Islamophobic tropes.

Milstein is hardly the first right-wing Israel defender to join the anti-Soros crusade. Last month, Yair Netanyahu, son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, tweeted an anti-Semitic meme depicting Soros controlling the world’s affairs, including his father’s political opponents. And earlier this summer, hours after Israel’s ambassador to Hungary joined Hungarian Jewish groups and Human Rights Watch in denouncing a state-backed anti-Soros smear campaign that, in the words of the ambassador’s statement, “evokes sad memories but also sows hatred and fear”, Israel’s Foreign Minister startlingly issued a ‘clarification’ that insisted that Soros was a legitimate target for criticism, accusing Soros of funding organizations “that defame the Jewish state and seek to deny it the right to defend itself”.

Indeed, today’s disturbing convergences between far-right antisemitic movements, and right-wing Israel advocacy more broadly, are becoming harder to ignore. For the second year in a row, Steve Bannon, former Trump advisor and architect of the alt-right Breitbart News Network, has been invited to speak at the Zionist Organization of America’s annual gala, this time joined by another former Trump advisor, Sebastian Gorka, member of the neo-Nazi group Vitezi Rend in Hungary. On Thursday, hours before Milstein deleted his Soros tweet, alt-right figurehead Richard Spencer, in a speech at the University of Florida, repeated his now-familiar mantra that Israel is a model for the white ethnostate he hopes to build in America, through a movement he regularly calls “white Zionism”. And earlier this year, Netanyahu, eager to avoid upsetting his allies in the Trump administration, was slow to condemn the white nationalist march in Charlottesville, even as chants of “Jews will not replace us!” struck terror into the hearts of American Jewry.

But as a proponent, through my work with JVP, of the right to boycott Israel on college campuses, Milstein’s anti-Semitic tweet hit close to home for me. The Milstein Foundation supports a plethora of pro-Israel campus groups, including Hillels across the country and Project Interchange, which recruits student government leaders throughout the UC system for trips to Israel designed to shore up support against BDS.

Milstein- who served three months in prison for felony tax evasion in 2009, despite a plea hearing in which Israel’s LA consul general, the CEO of StandWithUs, and other prominent Israel advocates intervened to request leniency- has personally backed undemocratic attempts to stifle criticism of Israel on college campuses. In 2014, it was revealed that Milstein had solicited funds from wealthy donors on behalf of multiple pro-Israel student senate candidates at the University of California-Los Angeles, in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to prevent student government from voting to divest from corporations complicit in Israel’s occupation. After the funds were channeled to student candidates through UCLA Hillel, the candidates, who did not disclose the contributions, swore to Milstein that they would work to make sure that UCLA “maintains its allegiance to Israel”.

Can we really trust figures like Milstein, and the larger right-wing Israel advocacy movement he represents, to safeguard Jewish students on college campuses, when they have shown themselves eager to align themselves politically with, and bolster the messaging of, antisemitic movements the world over?

There is a gift of remembrance, nestled in the human heart, that makes the angels tremble with jealousy. Remembrance is not the simple muscle memory of the living creature, human or animal, that yearns instinctually for the food it once had, misses shelter, longs for a lost kiss, or the embrace of a mother. In remembrance there is something more.

Looking at old photographs, engaged in reminiscience, there is a haunting, a deep sadness, an awareness of the passing of time itself, a sorrow and wisdom embedded in the notion that the moment itself, the presence of the present, is eternally passing away. Often we can hold this quality of remembrance before the powers of our thought for only a moment, before it flits away; as if we get glimpses of a secret dwelling within, and beyond, time itself.

The past is eternally past; this moment, too, is already past; the drama of our human lives will fade away, will be held onto only as sweet memory, as history. The hands of those who came before us have worked hard to bring us to the present. Our ancestors are no longer with us, and yet our remembrance of them is charged with gratitude, awe and responsibility.

It as if somewhere, a candle is lit that bathes the halls and caverns of time itself in the light of remembrance, a light suffused with the sigh of the human heart, the yearning, hope and sorrow of our incomplete redemption. When we turn our gaze upon the past, we see by virtue of this light only; in this light, the daily motions of humans upon the earth are captured as shadows. We cannot see this candle directly, but to sit before it fills our hearts with a deep, unspeakable sadness and a warm, unquenchable gratitude.

Nature already does a great job consecrating space; humans can build temples of spatial holiness that, in the end, mimic the beauty of nature, or gesture to a truth beyond it. This is all well and good, though one wonders if nature itself already offers, to our gaze, the most perfect temple imaginable.

But nature cannot speak of time or remembrance; before remembrance, nature is mute, its gaze does not venture towards these realms. An animal cannot tap into this eerie, ghostlike quality of awareness of the passing of time itself, in its ineffable, simple yet staggering beauty. It is as if humans have been gifted the ability to dwell in time, to consecrate time itself. It is given to humans to build structures of holiness in time itself. In our hearts and minds, existence doubles back upon itself; we are ‘he who writes and he who is written’ (Jabes). We are stewards of remembrance, entrusted to care for that candle that, flame bent towards the past, makes its nest in the very pulse of being.

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DOIKAYT

Welcome to Doikayt! This blog is about: radical Torah; fighting fascism and racism in the US; the Israel/Palestine conflict; Jewish history and identity; Yiddishkeit, and more.

The word ‘doikayt’, meaning ‘hereness’ in Yiddish, was the slogan of East-European Jewish socialists- we must struggle, with feet firmly planted where we stand, for the liberation of ourselves and all other people.

חזק חזק ונתחזק- Be strong, be strong, and may we strengthen one another!

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WHO IS DOIKAYT?

My name is Ben Lorber and I’m a writer, organizer, musician and radical Jew. Here mostly to smash fascism, raise the sparks, sing and bring Moshiach.

I make weird folksy music as Narrow Bridge- check out my Bandcamp! I live with my lovely partner and two cuddly cats in Chicago, Illinois.

This blog is where I put my political diatribes, philosophical musings, spiritual ponderings, and reflections on Jewish identity, history and more. It also houses occasional guest posts from comrades and chaverim.